One massively compulsive game playable within another massively compulsive game? Why, that’s like mixing Pringles with heroin. Yes, an official (from Popcap’s end, at least) Peggle plugin has been released for World of Warcraft. Which is a) terrifying b) exciting and c) supports the viewpoint that MMOs are not merely a genre anymore – they’re a platform all of their own these days.
The obvious response is “if you’re bored enough in WoW to want to go play Peggle instead, you should probably just stop playing WoW.” Which may be true, but it’s not that simple – the WoW devout like to live in WoW – it’s their internet. So this is a joyous thing – they don’t have to leave Azeroth if they want to play something else, plus it’s something to help while away those long minutes waiting for everyone to gather at the raid entrance or to cling to sanity during those oh-so-tedious cross-continental flights.

Sounds like Popcap have gone to some lengths to ensure WoWPeggle isn’t some weirdly compartmetalised hoojum of its own either – it can be used to settle loot rolls, there’s a versus mode, and there are customisable leaderboards (e.g. to create a ladder for your guild only). There’s even a special Peggle talent tree, for heaven’s sake. Aaargh…so…meta…hurts…brain.

Yes, this does signal The End Times. But it’s Peggle! Inside World of Warcraft! Also, free and available already. There’s also a similar Bejewelled plugin, which has been around for a while now – but, y’know, boring.

And you get Heavy Weapon Deluxe as a freebie for doing so. It seems a pretty fun (also rather hard, but maybe I’m just rubbish) scrolling shooter that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the Amiga (probably in a “this is how I remember them being” rather than “this is how they were” kind of way). It also has nukes and MEGALASER!s.

I fully expect something similar to turn up on Steam too. Playing Popcap games after getting shot in the face by a 12 year old in Counter-Strike after ten seconds and having something to do until round end.

It’s not exactly hard to play EVE and something else at the same time, hell I used to sleep and play EVE at the same time.

EVE’s skill system is so scarily like progress quest that it isn’t even funny. At least progress quest you have to keep it running, EVE doesn’t matter if you have your PC turned off or if you are sitting at your PC giving the game your full attention, you gain skill level at the same boring slow rate regardless. When I found myself only logging in to EVE once every few days to start the next skill training I realised it was time to pack in my subscription.

If you need to play a game in order to keep yourself occupied (and, I can only assume, entertained) while ostensibly already playing a game… Doesn’t that defeat the point? Yes, I understand that it’s possible to use WoW or some other MMO as basically a chat client. Hell, I’ve done that on occasion. But still… Recursive entertainment?

Mm. I’ve known about this for ages but seeing it manifest like a terrible brain-slug is actually far more worrisome.

But no doubt this will set off the WoW despisers with self-congratulatory chin-stroking over the idea that a game could be so boring that you want to play other games while you wait.

Well notwithstanding that, as an MMO, WoW takes longer to play per session than most single-player games, WoW has plenty of “timesink” moments, where play is elongated with periods of inactivity. For heavy raiders, waiting for your goddamn offtank to get a bloody move on and get back from walking his goddamn dog can get tedious the nth time. And everyone’s got bored at some point or other travelling from A to B (especially with the current crop of irritating daily quests from the Argent Tournament).

And having Peggle in WoW isn’t actually all that new or weird. You can already have Peggle running in the background ready to alt-tab to during an idle moment. Or the BBC iPlayer. Or a dvd. Or (god forbid) posting snippy comments to Rock Paper Shotgun.

I’m not all that surprised really; seeing the amount of people who randomly stand around/fly around/show off their mounts while waiting for the next Wintergrasp/Battleground/Raid/Heroic to form, I’d say people definitely would have an interest in something to pass the time while doing so.

I fear for a day when we might end up with personal multifunction displays hovering before our eyes; seeing Bejeweled and Peggle making their way into WoW.. I can so see those driving accidents caused by cluttered MFDs that System Shock II mentioned.

Bobsy beat me to it. It’s the nature of an MMO that there will be downtime waiting on other people because 25 people in one place is a lot of opportunity for unforeseen interruption. The only solution Blizzard could implement would be AI for AFK players…

As someone else pointed out – this points out almost exactly where the game designers failed. If you need another game to play because the first one has ten minutes of down time, you might want to consider patching up that gameplay hole with something fun, reducing the wait, automating things etc… rather than stuff in another game to relive boredom.

1) Puzzle Pirates had the forsight to build their entire game around tetris like puzzles, might as well have them sign a deal with Peggle to use it for attacking land based fortress with ships ;P
2) Does this mean from now on instead of having a bunch of idiots begging to duel you all the time in towns you’ll have a thousand peggle duel requests to ignore? )sigh(
3)In Eve you should be able to play asteroids while waiting.

I’m amazed they didn’t compile the code into encrypted pub files, Blizzard style, I’m amazed that hasn’t happened actually since this is clearly some sort of licensing deal.

The end result is that, after looking over the code (which they did their best to obfuscate, but that’s only a very minor delaying tactic), I can tell you that this would be very, very easy to tamper with. I can see a bunch of people using haxed Peggles to win loot rolls, to further their own greedy ends.

Damn you, Blizzard, damn you for corrupting everything! Peggle was something pure before it landed in Warcraft, now there’ll be a mess of people arguing over whether the next WoW gamer was playing Peggle or Haggle*.

(That’s what I imagine the hacked version of Peggle is going to be called when it’s released.)

This is stunning, I had no clue you could get Heroin laced Pringles. Is it like a whole can or just the little snack pack thing in vending machines? How will this change PC gaming when Hot Pockets and Cheetos will be forced to make a competing product?